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  People who were really close to Willa Mae called her Bill. I wasn't close to Willa Mae, not the way other girls I knew said they were close to their maids, not the way I'd read about in all those old-timey novels about the South, not the way I thought I should be close. Early on when we moved into this house, my grandmother declared that if my mother was going to teach every day, someone had to be home when I came home from school, so she arranged for Willa Mae to come to our house every afternoon around three to clean, iron, and sometimes cook for an hour or until my mother came home. I figured that because Willa Mae knew someone else was paying her, she had decided not to allow herself to get too close to us. I guess she figured, who knew how long this arrangement would last?

  I pressed my chin to my chest to check for any new developments. "Do you think I should be wearing a bra?"

  Willa Mae glanced over my way briefly. She was as black as a person could be, and the white of her teeth glowed when she snickered. "That's not something you need."

  My mother would be home soon. After teaching all day, she came home tired and took a thirty-minute nap. Sometimes she stayed there in her room, and I could hear her walking the floor. I knew she was thinking of my father then. I don't know how I knew, but I knew.

  We heard two car doors slam shut in the carport. My mother came in through the back door, her arms loaded with papers and books. She was with a man.

  He wore black jeans and pointy black boots and he was carrying a big canvas satchel and two bags of groceries. He had at least three cameras around his neck.

  "Set the table, sweetie," my mother called in a singsong voice. Her eyes crinkled shut when she laughed. "We've got company for dinner."

  My mother introduced this man to me and to Willa Mae, who didn't look up but only nodded and continued ironing one of my mother's white shirts. His name was Perry Walker and he called me "kiddo" right off the bat. My mother suggested we all get started on dinner.

  "I don't cook," I said, looking this Perry up and down. He laughed.

  "She cooks all the time," my mother said, unpacking the groceries.

  She set a pan of water on to boil and asked me to get the skillet.

  "Do you teach with my mother?" My mother was already chopping an onion. I could hear Willa Mae in the next room, unplugging the iron, wrapping the cord around it. When Willa Mae had finished ironing, the shirts and everything else in the house smelled starchy and white. My mother and this Perry were messing up this good clean smell with their cooking. That night was supposed to be grilled cheese night for my mother and me, and it was supposed to be just us two.

  "Perry just joined the faculty," my mother told me. "He moved from New York City in, what, July? Can you imagine how crazy this place must be to Perry, Sam? What do you think of this heat, Perry?"

  "Are we talking weather or politics?"

  "Oh, come on," my mother said. "It's not that bad."

  "Depends on your definition of bad"

  Perry told me he was a photographer and he was teaching a new class in photography.

  "What kind of pictures do you take?"

  "Everything. Wrecks, people, houses, you name it. But I draw the line at tree bark. I just don't want to see any more close-ups of tree bark." He laughed, carefully putting all the cameras hanging around his neck into his big satchel.

  I stared at him. I couldn't help myself. What was this man doing in our kitchen, in our house?

  "Perry's pictures have appeared in Life magazine, Sam," my mother said. "He's very talented."

  Perry smiled and shrugged. "Anybody can take a good picture. I just happened to be around during catastrophic events. I guess that makes me an ambulance chaser."

  "So what brings you here?" I asked.

  He could have made a joke. He could have just said teaching. He could have made up something, but no. He went on as though I really cared because I was dumb enough to ask. He said he thought the South was this really amazing part of the country. He said that he sometimes went across town, across the tracks, into the houses of Negroes and took pictures of them and how they lived. He said that he believed that maybe, if people in the North and in the South saw them as people, eating cereal, doing laundry and folding clothes, sweeping their porches, just like everybody else does—if people knew their stories, maybe, just maybe, they'd quit lynching them.

  "I'm ready, miss." Willa Mae stood at the kitchen's threshold holding her handbag, her hat already on. She wore shoes with the top tips cut out to give her toes room. We all grew quiet, knowing Willa Mae had heard that word lynching. Had this idiot Perry Walker forgotten she was only in the next room?

  I just stood there and shook my head, hoping this Perry felt like the fool I thought he was. My mother taught me without ever having to tell me that you didn't discuss the race situation out loud. You just did the right thing, always. We're all people, she told me. Black or white. That's what her family believed and that's what my dad's family believed.

  It never took my mother long to drive Willa Mae home because she lived only a few blocks away, but it was understood that Willa Mae would never walk home.

  "I'll come with," I said, getting ready to leave. I could see Willa Mae smirk. She knew I'd much rather sit in the back seat with her. She could tell I didn't like this guy, Perry.

  "No, you will not," my mother said. "You can help Perry with the rest of dinner."

  When my mother left the house, she left behind a trail of sweet perfume.

  "So. Are you one of those outside agitators?" My mother was gone now. I could say anything.

  Perry laughed. "I'm just a photographer. The only thing I agitate is my camera and myself. Maybe some other teachers. And some students. Geez. I guess I'm an agitator." He opened a cabinet, saying he needed salt and pepper. Jars of peach, pear, fig, and plum preserves stood in a straight row before him like an army of Confederate soldiers, their masking tape labels made out in my grandmother's neat script. Perry stopped working on dinner and went to his big satchel, opened it, pulled out a camera, and this I couldn't believe. He started snapping pictures of my grandmother's preserves.

  "My mother doesn't like photography. She prefers paintings." We had two paintings, one big enough to cover the wall behind the living room sofa. We called it the Spider because that was what it looked like most. Another painting hung in my mother's bedroom. It was a painting a student of hers had done of a medieval scene, but all the figures were out of proportion to the building they were in. I was never sure if that was on purpose.

  Perry just smiled. He took some pictures of me sitting on the kitchen stool, even though I said I didn't like having my picture taken.

  When my mother came back, I caught her fixing her hair and checking her reflection in the oven door.

  ***

  Over spaghetti and garlic bread, my mother and this Perry Walker talked about their day and other faculty members. He did funny imitations of people, making my mother, and once even me, laugh. Then he started talking about things like contact sheets, cropping, and sepia toners.

  "Why do you think you like taking pictures so much, Perry?" my mother asked. She turned up her hearing aid. She'd had polio as a child and lost most of her hearing in her right ear, but this was the first time in ages I'd seen her turn her aid up. Ever since the man from the military had come to our door to deliver the news about my father's death, she mostly turned her hearing aid down or off altogether. She put her elbow on the table, her face in her hand, and leaned in to listen. Crumbs stuck to her lipstick.

  Perry shrugged. "Photography lets me get out of my own skin. I mostly bore myself."

  Perry and I could both tell my mother was disappointed. She wanted an artsy answer. She wanted Perry to say something like My pictures are a record of what the camera sees, not always what I see. My mother was a sucker for art talk.

  "Perry and I are going to give a series of art lectures at Tougaloo," my mother said. She knew I was getting bored. Tougaloo was an all-black college in Jackson. My m
other's college was all white. Blacks weren't allowed to attend any college event. My mother told me only weeks before that the administrators at her college also discouraged faculty from teaching, visiting, or speaking at Tougaloo.

  "Won't you get in trouble?" I asked.

  My mother said she didn't care. They were wrong to impose such a ridiculous rule as keeping black people out of a public lecture at an institute for higher learning. Those were her words. She told me Perry was involved in the civil rights movement. "Last year I didn't know what to do about it." She looked at Perry then. "Now I do. If those students can't come to me, I'll go to them."

  Perry smiled and raised his glass. They clinked glasses and drank to some silent toast. Had he put her up to this?

  "You had your first day of school today too, right?" he said. "How was it? Have any big assignments to look forward to?"

  I had to admit I liked that he said this and not How was your day? Or Did you make any nice new friends? He asked me in a way that made me feel older, like we were working together.

  "There's going to be a dance in November," I said. "Miss Jenkins needs chaperones."

  "That's one parent duty I could sign up for," my mother said. "I'll call her in the morning."

  Then I told them about my state project. Perry said he remembered those kinds of assignments. "Please, please don't be one of those kids who cut out pictures from a magazine, then glue them into a collage on posterboard."

  That was exactly what I had planned on doing.

  "Okay. So what should I do?"

  "Easy. Take your own pictures."

  "I don't have a camera."

  "Here." He gave me the camera he had been using. "Now you do. Take it. Really. It's an old one, but reliable."

  My mother went through all the reasons Perry shouldn't and couldn't lend me his old camera, but he insisted. "This camera is like me. It's indestructible. Really. Tell you what. Try it out, and if you like it, well, we'll see how it goes. Deal?"

  It was a black Asahi Pentax, and it was heavy. He showed me how to load film and batteries and how to use the one lens.

  "Film is cheap," he said. "Use it."

  He showed me how to focus and refocus, telling me that exposure was based on the quantity of light that reached the film. Overexposure made negatives too dark, while underexposure made negatives too light.

  When he tried to explain about the light and the shutter and how the aperture or lens opening could be adjusted like the iris of your eyes, I told him to stop because I didn't get it.

  "All you have to know now is that a camera is like your eye. To focus, keep one eye closed, while you're looking with the other. It brings everything closer," he said. "You can hide behind a camera."

  This I got. This I liked.

  "What should I take pictures of?"

  He said the word photography came from two Greek words that meant "light drawing." Drawing with light. "I know," he said, looking at the expression on my face. "I sound like a pinhead, don't I? But this stuff is cool. Light makes photography possible. Photographers have their own reality. Sometimes the ideas are more important than the subject. We can be like painters. Maybe even better."

  "So?" I said. I hated when grownups didn't just answer a question. "What should I take pictures of?"

  He looked at me. "Anything you would paint. Anything you look at or wonder about or want to know more about." He closed the camera, wound the film, then lifted it to his right eye and snapped a picture of my mother.

  For dessert, we had some of the jarred peaches Tine and I canned with my grandmother, and I took a few pictures of my mother and Perry eating them.

  ***

  At school, instead of having gym class, we made white roses out of Kleenex, tying them with green pipe cleaners for parent-teacher night. Then, the following night, on parent-teacher night, Mary Alice made fun of Miss Jenkins outside in the hall while her little brother, Jeffy, made off with half the cookies. Through the closed door, I could hear Mary Alice's mother paying Miss Jenkins compliments, making up nice things Mary Alice had never said about her.

  When her turn came that night, my mother just crossed her legs and listened. I overheard Miss Jenkins tell my mother how sorry she was to hear about my father, how highly she regarded him, how it seemed too that I was having a tough time making friends. It turned out that Miss Jenkins knew my father from way back in Franklin, back when he was in high school and she was starting out in her teaching career. That's how old Miss Jenkins was. Then I overheard my mother tell Miss Jenkins that she wasn't much of a cookies-and-milk mom, but she was very good when it came to course work. Course work. Those were her words. That and curriculum. I couldn't see the expression on Miss Jenkins's face, but I could only imagine. Did Kleenex roses count as course work? I think I even heard my mother tell Miss Jenkins that she believed that an ordinary life wasn't good enough, that it was supposed to be special.

  My mother left parent-teacher night without eating one cookie, whispering to me, "I see we're going to have to supplement."

  ***

  Two weeks later, Miss Jenkins told us it was time we all started thinking seriously about our state reports. She didn't tell us exactly how we should do this. I considered my options, thinking mostly about the camera Perry had loaned me and loaded for me. What did I wonder about?

  I usually got up early most mornings, but now I went out with a camera. There was something about walking around up and down the street in our subdivision while everyone else was asleep—something secretive and special. Some mornings, it felt as though I were still dreaming, and I snapped fuzzy close-ups of bugs, bird's nests, rocks, a patch of lawn, or my own dewy, grass-covered feet.

  One morning, I climbed on top of a cinder block to get to the high shelf in our carport where my mother kept my dad's old army coat and his scratchy moss green army blanket. He had used these in Korea, and when he came back, he said he really didn't want to give them away but he didn't want to look at them either. After he died, my mother felt the same—she couldn't give them away, but she couldn't look at them either. I spread the coat out on the carport cement, bending the right sleeve in a salute. I took its picture.

  ***

  In science we read about monkeys and someone in class asked if it was really possible that we came from monkeys. Miss Jenkins listened and nodded, then told us not to think too hard on such things.

  I wondered about people. I thought about Willa Mae's days. When I sat and talked with her she was at the kitchen sink or standing over the ironing board. I thought about how much of her time, how much of her day was spent staring into a kitchen sink. I took a picture of the kitchen sink, just as she left it, the soap bubbles still there, popping. I climbed up on a stool and took a picture of her dark, dry hands smoothing the wrinkles flat over my mother's pleated gray teaching skirt. I took a picture of her pinning our sheets on the clothesline, then of her throwing them up like parachutes as she made our beds. She didn't smile for the camera. She wasn't like that. But we laughed some.

  At school, after a month had passed, we all came to realize that Mary Alice had a pair of knee socks to match every different colored skirt she owned. And most days she told the class of new ways her little brother, Jeffy, pulled a practical joke on their maid. He especially enjoyed spraying shaving cream into his pillowcase on sheet-changing day.

  Next in science we began to study the earth, the solar system, and the other planets. In the classroom, Miss Jenkins used new satellite photos, and it all looked so different from the way it had in seventh or eighth grade. Less perfect. Our moon was pockmarked with craters. There weren't any of the black lines that divided our states or made up our country's borders as we'd learned from our one-dimensional maps.

  ***

  Perry was coming over all the time now. He taught me how to develop my pictures. He had two darkrooms, one at his home and one at the college. We used the one at the college because he said it was big enough for the two of us. His processing trays
were lined up in a neat row. Holding his print tongs, he showed me how to wash and dry prints. He taught me how to make contact sheets and proof sheets. He told me about resin-coated prints, resolutions, and photo composites. While he talked about different exposures and their effects, he showed me how to mix the chemicals, how to soak, wash, and then dry the paper.

  "It's magic, isn't it?" he said.

  Seeing the pictures appear, the images coming out of the blank paper soaking in the neat rows of trays filled with clear liquid, went beyond magic.

  The first pictures we developed were the pictures I'd taken of things I wondered about: my dad's army coat, the kitchen sink after Willa Mae had been there.

  "Your mom told me about your dad," Perry said, looking at the picture of the coat. "I bet you miss him."

  I didn't say anything. I couldn't. It didn't feel right telling this man about my dad. My throat choked at the thought. He'd always held my hand when I was scared, even when I shouldn't have been. He read to me at night. He could cook and hunt and farm and do just about anything. His helicopter crashed. He stayed with his men. And now? Now I was beginning to forget what he smelled like.

  CHAPTER 3

  AT SCHOOL MISS JENKINS TALKED ON AND ON about The War, which was The War Between the States, which was The Civil War, which I thought I'd left behind in middle school. It seemed as though everyone in my class had great-grandfathers or great-uncles who either fought or survived during Civil War times. Everybody took turns telling her own version about what happened at the battle of Chancellorsville or at Brice's Crossroads.

  "So you see, the Civil War wasn't only about slavery at all," Miss Jenkins finally said, looking over the top rim of her glasses, daring us. We were nearing the end of the section. "It was about states' rights."

  "The South should have won," Jimmy Ray said. "We had more reason to win. We just ran out of food and money. The North sure didn't win because they were better'n us, that's for sure."

  People in my class who usually didn't say anything were talking. They were saying things that sounded a lot like what their parents probably told them. People had done this at my old school in Pittsburgh last year too.